The discs will still be made available to Local Community team members and Ubuntu contributors. And new Ubuntu users will be able to request a CD. But you need to create an account and sign in to request that CD. In other words, Canonical will be tracking you and will only send you a free CD the first time you ask for one.

The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of openSUSE 11.2. openSUSE 11.2 includes new versions of GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, the Linux kernel, and many, many more updates and improvements. In 11.2 you’ll find more than 1,000 open source desktop applications. openSUSE also includes a full suite of server software and a rich selection of open source development tools.

Here it is, patent number7617530. Thanks, USPTO, for giving Microsoft, which is already a monopoly, a monopoly on something that’s been in use since 1980 and wasn’t invented by Microsoft. Here’s Wikipedia’s description of sudo, which you can meaningfully compare to Microsoft’s description of its “invention”.

The latest MPlayer code in their SVN trunk now supports most HD-DVD and Blu-ray codecs. Earlier this year we talked about possible Blu-ray support for FFmpeg and developers becoming more interested after we interviewed the FFmpeg developers and there ended up being an outpouring of support by our readers offering up Blu-ray drives and other forms of help. The latest MPlayer code in their Subversion repository now supports most Blu-ray and HD-DVD codecs.

If you are using Linux and are looking for a screencasting tool that would suit you needs, then here are some of most widely used free and open source screencasting software applications that you should check out.